Maxwell Hunter entered. Back to me, he walked up to Jake’s bed. In his late forties, Hunter stood as tall and broad of shoulder as Jake but was all lean, hard muscles. Dark-haired, he had a Romanesque nose that had taken at least one solid break and large fists, now clenched, which had doubtless broken many others. I bit at my lower lip, trying to stay silent, instinct warning me not to disturb him.
I could see Hunter’s reflection in the window. As he looked down at his ex-partner, lying still and pale in the bed, his eyes narrowed. He swallowed hard. His lips were one thin, grim line, his anguish obvious. I felt my heart go out to him.
Suddenly, his eyes cut left, hardening. “Come to admire your handiwork?” he said in a deep baritone.
I started. How? Oh, right: Snell’s law. If I can see his reflection, he can see mine. Standing, I moved forward. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He turned, reaching me in two short strides. Pointing at Jake, he said, “You were supposed to watch his back, and he got a bullet in it. That puts blame on you.” Hunter had six inches on me and at least sixty pounds. It felt like a brick wall had rerouted itself to within inches from my face. And the wall was pissed.
My thoughts stumbled. This from the man who’d saved my life less than an hour ago? “Are you kidding me?”
“Do I look like I’m kidding, Angel?” Although his bayou accent had been all but polished away by professional coaching, exposure to Jake’s long, lean drawl allowed me to discern the subtle cadence that was Cajun. But there was nothing subtle in his meaning.
I grimaced in confusion. “Come on. I tried—”
Hunter put his hands to his hips, thrust out his chest, and pushed back his jacket to reveal a gleaming gray forty-five Magnum tucked in a shoulder holster. “You tried, did you? Well, tell me something. If you tried, why the fuck does he have a bullet in his back?”
Blood rushed to my face. “Hey! This wasn’t my fault.”
“That’s right,” Hunter said with a sneer. “God forbid daddy’s little girl has to take responsibility for her own screw-ups.”
“I’m not like that,” I said, my jaw pressed so tight I thought my teeth would crack.
“Like hell! I know your type.” Hunter turned and paced like a caged leopard looking for a meal—a powerful beast not used to being restrained—and I hated how much he enthralled my attention. It wasn’t just his wealth. Yes, while Jake had stayed in the blue-collar world of the hard-working small-business man, Hunter had soared to the stratosphere of society. His gunmetal-gray designer suit probably cost more than I made in six months. And the price of his Italian loafers and silk shirt, the color of a cool, dry Zinfandel, would’ve paid for my groceries for the year. But it was the potent masculinity of him that made my heart shudder.
Damn it!
Then, suddenly, he was standing before me again, snapping his fingers in front of my face. “Am I boring you here?”
I started, both embarrassed and angry at myself. “Don’t be such a jerk.”
Hunter scoffed at me. “He couldn’t afford you, you know. You were a pity hire: a doe-eyed little girl who needed Daddy to rescue her. God help all men who fall for that one. But let me tell you something, if I’d been there, this wouldn’t have happened.”
“You don’t know that! Look, Hunter, I know you’re angry, and it’s natural for you to channel it outward. But laying all of this on me—”
Hunter strode up and jabbed a finger into my chest. “Don’t you dare psychoanalyze me! I will not stand here and let you look down your nose at me.”
I swatted his hand away. “Back off! I didn’t mean it that way. Why are you so—?”
He snorted. “You listen to me, Angel. That man is my friend. And if he dies, I’m going to put whoever did this into a blender, piece by piece. I’ll take out anyone who gets in my way, and that includes you. Now, let’s go.” He gestured toward the corridor.
My skin prickled with alarm. I wanted to go somewhere alone with this large, angry man about as much as I wanted to take a long stroll through the savannah with a pack of drooling hyenas. Naked. “Where?” I asked.
“Voltaire wants to see you, again.”
Hunter moved forward, herding me out the door and toward the conference room where the chief had set up station. It wasn’t a big surprise that, being a friend of Jake’s and Hunter’s, Voltaire had thrown his weight behind the investigation. That was bad news for the bad guys, as he’s known to be ruthlessly impatient at the best of times. And these sure as hell weren’t those.
A dozen people milled about as we entered the room, male and female, dressed in uniform and civvies, all hovering around Voltaire like planetoids caught in a gravitational field. The field didn’t flutter when I entered. But, as Hunter strode in, all eyes cut to him.
“Here she is, Vince,” Hunter said.
Petulance got the best of me. “Here she is, Vince,” I murmured.
Unfortunately for me, everyone chose that moment to go silent, and the whole room heard my snide echo. Ah, wonderful. Just great!
A voice in the back said, “Looks like somebody missed her nap.”
“She needs a time-out,” came the reply, followed by a round of low-pitched laughs.
My cheeks burned red. Way to look like an ass, Madison!
Hunter leaned down to whisper in my ear. “Good job, Angel. That’ll get their respect.”
I stared straight ahead. “Blow it out your kazoo.”
“Actually, Angel, the big boys usually say: blow it out your ass.”
I glanced over my shoulder. Hunter stood so close I could feel his breath on me: warm and sweet. Shades of midnight blue glinted amidst the slate shade of his eyes. But I was not about to be distracted again. I stared straight into those eyes and whispered. “Why don’t you just get some big boys to blow it for you, then?”
He smiled broadly, eyes twinkling. Chuckling as he straightened up, he said, “Not bad, Angel. There might be hope for you yet.”
I’d been watching Voltaire out of the corner of my eye. During my and Hunter’s exchange, he hadn’t looked up once. After all, he wasn’t talking so there was nothing worth his attention. Now he turned to look at me, and everyone went silent. The opposite of physically imposing, he was slight, almost anemic-looking, with a sharp nose, gaunt face, and wispy blond hair thinning at the top. But it was his Rasputinesque eyes that got to people: narrow and intense, with almost-black irises that could pin a person in place, like needles through a butterfly. Nor did the butterfly have to be dead. I took a step back toward Hunter, stumbling as I did. The twisting motion pulled at the stitches of my wound, and I grimaced.
Voltaire gave me a look of impatient disdain. I dropped my arm and swallowed to hide the pain of the action. I’d be damned if I showed weakness before any of them.
The police chief stared at me, as if waiting to see if I’d crack. Then he raised an eyebrow and nodded at one of his female cops, who stepped forward and held a photo before me. As Voltaire was not a man to waste time on words, his inner retinue pretty much had to be psychic.
“That the guy you were following?” Voltaire asked, pointing at the picture.
I looked at it. It was the Alfie doppelganger from the alley. “Yes, name is Octaviano Lathos. At approximately 5:10 p.m. we were engaged in a routine surveillance of—”
“Can the Dragnet bit, kid.” He looked at Hunter. “You were right about her.”
I turned to Hunter. “What does he mean? What did you tell him about me?” Hunter grinned. I faced Voltaire. “What did he tell you about me?”
“Just say what you saw and drop the drama.”
I drew a quick breath, ready to snap back, but remembered Jake’s admonition that my reputation affected his. I let the breath out. I wouldn’t let Jake down. “I didn’t see anything.”
“You mean you didn’t see a face?”
“I mean, I didn’t see anything. No face, no body, no silhouette, nothing.”
“Rasmen!” Voltaire barke
d, and I flinched.
An unremarkable looking man—balding, brown eyes, tan shirt, tan pants—stepped forward: Gene Rasmen, the detective of record and Nestor’s ex-partner. “Yeah, boss.”
“The shots came from 400 feet away, yeah?”
Rasmen flipped open a small notebook. “That’s about right.”
Voltaire turned to me. “Jake was shot in the back. He dropped out of your line of sight, so you had clear view. You did look? Someone shoots at you, and you look?” He held his hands up wide, taking in the whole room with his gaze. “Or is that just me?”
A chuckle rounded the room. I ground my teeth hard. “It happened too quickly. Jake was shot. I tried to catch him. I started to look, but then I fell. I thought I’d been shot too.” More snickering. Tough guys. Like they’ve never been scared!
“Seconds?” Voltaire demanded suddenly.
I blinked, confused. “Seconds?”
“Between when he falls and you faint,” Rasmen chimed in.
Faint? You—! No, don’t give them the satisfaction. The muscles in my neck were stretched tighter than a rubber band on a two-year-old’s toy plane. I reached to massage them. Pain shot down my side, and I sucked in a quick breath. Voltaire scowled. I dropped my arm, defiant. “It happened in five, six seconds, maybe.”
Voltaire walked toward me, his right hand folded into a parody of a gun. “One-thousand one, one-thousand two …” When he got to “one-thousand six,” his finger rested on my forehead. “Now, me, with all that time, I’d have looked. Or ducked.”
I jerked my head away. “I was surprised. I hesitated. Okay? It’s a normal human reaction, and if it doesn’t meet with your approval, I’d say that’s your problem.”
The room went still as if all were waiting for the ax to fall, buckets ready to catch my head. I could almost feel Hunter smile behind me. Voltaire stared at me, silent. I held my breath.
His eyes narrowed ever so slightly, and I could have sworn I saw a gleam in them similar to what—in a human anyway—would have been appreciation. Abruptly, he said, “Details.” At my puzzled look, he spoke with deliberation, as if talking to a slow-witted child, “Tell me again why the two of you were in the alley.”
“Domestic surveillance. Lathos’s wife hired us to catch him cheating.”
“His wife, eh?” Voltaire raised an eyebrow to Hunter, who nodded in return.
“That’s right.” I looked at Hunter, but I couldn’t catch his eye. I turned back to Voltaire. “What’s going on?”
Voltaire crossed his arms and looked down at me, his face grim. “There is no wife.”
“No wife? What do you mean? She wasn’t at home?”
He unfolded his arms. “Lathos isn’t married.”
The same spare cop held up a rap sheet before me as if in answer to some clairvoyant command. The “marital status” block was checked off as single.
“He’s never been married, either,” Voltaire said.
I stared at the paper, trying to process the information through a growing fog of fatigue and frustration. “That doesn’t make sense. Jake said the wife hired us—”
“Jake said?” Rasmen asked, scribbling in his book. “You never met the wife?”
Sighing, I said, “No. The whole deal was arranged by phone between her and Jake.”
“Well, there’s no wife,” Voltaire said. “And there’s no Lathos either, not nearby anyway. It looks like he flew the coop. But we found these at his place.” Voltaire nodded and “spare cop” handed me four eight by ten photographs of Jake. One of him getting out of his car in front of a courthouse, one of him leaving a bar, one taken outside the office, and one of him on stakeout in his car. The last was clearly taken from a high window, so I couldn’t see Jake’s face, only his unmistakably-Jake-side-of-beef-size arm. My gut clutched as I recognized myself standing next to Jake outside the office. Even more disturbing, someone had drawn a “happy face” in bright yellow marker over Jake’s head, under which they’d written: “bye, bye Big D.”
I shivered, handing the photos back. “This is freaky. So Lathos was following Jake?”
“Looks like it, Angel,” Hunter said. “Any idea why?”
“No. We were following him. Or so we thought. Have you found anything in his arrest record? Did Jake ever bring him in? Here, or maybe when you two were cops in New Orleans?”
“Clever little us, we thought of that, Angel. But, no and no. And I looked back through my files. As far as we can tell, their paths never crossed.”
“Lathos must be part of the setup, whatever his motivation. Does he have a record?”
“He was a small-time scam artist: telephone and Internet,” Hunter said. “He’d claim to be the power company and talk harried moms and dads into giving up their credit card numbers, that kind of thing. But still, strictly B-team.”
Voltaire looked at me. “Tell me about this file you say you put together on the case—”
His tone, laced with sarcasm, put me on edge. “What do you mean the one I say I put together? I took Jake’s notes from the calls and organized them in a file. That was my job.”
Hunter nodded. “Yeah, he was crap at keeping files. I always had to do it.”
I turned back to Voltaire. “What about the file?”
Voltaire stared hard at me. “There’s no file on the Lathos case in Jake’s office.”
“That can’t be,” I said. “I took it out this morning and put it on his desk. Maybe it fell off.” I looked at Detective Rasmen. “Did you look around?”
“Oh!” Rasmen said with great exaggeration. “Was I supposed to look around? Nobody told me that.” More snickers. “Gee, don’t I feel dumb. Du-uh. Here let me make a note of that.” He wrote in his book, using the clumsy motion of a child, and then smiled at the group.
I bit my cheek. Clearly, blood—my blood—was in the water, and the sharks were hungry.
“That’s enough,” Voltaire said. The residual chuckling cut out. “Tell me exactly when and where you last saw it.”
I searched my memory. “I pulled it out this morning at eight a.m. and laid it on Jake’s desk. I put it in the middle of the blotter, smack in the middle, so he couldn’t miss it.”
“Why did you take it out?” Hunter asked.
“Jake had a phone appointment with Mrs. Lathos—well, with whomever hired him. He was supposed to be at his desk at eleven a.m. She was going to call him for an update.”
“And did she?” Voltaire asked.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I’d gone out to pick up lunch.”
Voltaire snorted. “Early lunch. Must be nice to have a boss who pampers you like that.”
“It wasn’t just for me. See, every Tuesday, like today, the restaurant at the corner makes New England clam chowder, which Mr. Keeper—the guy who runs the watch shop upstairs—loves. I mean, he really loves it. And, even though he’s like a hundred and something, he’d walk down to get some every week. One day, he almost died of heat stroke. So, Jake made this big deal about how he loves chowder and told Mr. Keeper that he bought me lunch for picking his up. So, Mr. Keeper shouldn’t feel bad about adding one small cup of chowder for me to carry back.”
“Jake hated chowder,” Hunter said.
“Yes, you know that, and I know that, but Mr. Keeper didn’t know that. I’d get Jake the chili instead, and Mr. Keeper never knew the difference.”
“Sounds like something Jake would do.” Hunter nodded, smiling indulgently.
Voltaire grunted. “So you weren’t there when the call came in from this ‘Mrs. Lathos’?”
“No. I was where I always am on Tuesday at eleven a.m.: getting lunch.”
“And he didn’t say anything about it later?”
I shook my head. “No. Jake was gone when I got back. He left a note that he’d gone to buy seed for George. He came back an hour later, and we went on the stakeout.”
“George? That’s his parrot?”
“Strictly speaking, George is a budgerigar, common
ly called a budgie, which is a subset of the parrot species. But, more precisely, he’s a parakeet, referring to any one of a large number of unrelated members of the species, all of whom—” Voltaire glared at me. I nodded. “Yeah. The parrot. Okay, so no file. What about the note from the alley, the one that referred to Jake as ‘Big D.’ Did your guys find it?”
Voltaire shook his head.
“Are you sure you saw it?” Rasmen said in a snarky tone. “Maybe you were suffering from some kind of chowder-induced hallucination.”
I shot him a disgusted look. “Yes, I saw it.”
He arched a brow at me. “Just like you saw the file that no one can find?”
“The note was there, and the file was there, and if you can’t find them—” I shrugged. “Maybe you’re just no good at your job.”
Rasmen’s eyes darkened, and he moved toward me. “You little—”
“Enough!” Voltaire barked. “I don’t have time for this shit!” He pointed at Rasmen. “You—find that goddamned note! Take the place apart brick by brick if you have to. Got me?”
Rasmen backed off, ducking his head submissively to his boss but keeping his eyes locked on me. He shut his notebook with a snap and motioned for another of the cops to follow him out. Not surprisingly, he clipped me with his shoulder as he passed by. How original.
“This note, are you sure it was meant for Jake?” Voltaire said.
“He reacted as if it did, especially to the phrase: ‘Big D.’ ”
The chief looked over my head at Hunter, who’d moved to stand close behind me. I gritted my teeth, trying to ignore the subtle, spicy scent of his cologne. But, yum, it was nice.
Voltaire asked him, “Did you ever hear anyone call Jake that?”
“Never,” Hunter said.
“Okay, you check it out. It has to mean something! You knew him the best. Yeah?”
Hunter nodded and pulled out his smartphone.
Voltaire turned to me. “Lathos’ playmate: have you remembered her name yet?”
“The wife—or whoever she was—only knew her first name: Tina. What about the man who attacked me an hour ago? Is there any relation between him and her or Octaviano?”
“We haven’t been able to match the piss-poor description you gave.”
The Last Best Lie Page 5